Development tidbits, struggles, revelations, and still some Flash

Everyone has been blogging about Flex 2 Beta 1 being released, but Adobe has also released the new alpha for Flash Player 8.5 as a separate download. Alpha 3 is available for Windows (ActiveX and plugin) and Mac OSX. The uninstallers are also on the same page.

http://www.macromedia.com/go/labs_flex2_downloads

Of course, if you need to test a lot of Flash player versions, don’t bother with uninstalling and reinstalling, just grab Flash Plugin Switcher.

http://www.kewbee.de/FlashPluginSwitcher/index.php

Over at the UltraShock forums, they are taking suggestions for features for AfterEffects for when Eric of 2Advanced meets with Adobe to talk about AfterEffects and how it can be improved to work better with Flash. Head over and give your input.  This reminded me of a forum discussion at FlashFilmmaker.com that I stumbled upon recently. Chris Georgenes was getting opinions of how Flash could be improved for better AE/Flash integration, specifically the future of the Flash timeline.

Personally, I would love to see Flash become more like AE. I had a hard time adjusting to the Flash timeline when I first started using it 8 years ago and I always found the Flash timeline odd, and the lack of real control limiting when animating. Now, I have long since adjusted to this but there are still days that it just makes me scream.

So this got me thinking again that maybe Adobe was looking to bring back LiveMotion – or atleast its essence. Adobe definitely is asking around on how to bring these two applications together and provide better integration. Changing the Flash timeline could upset a lot of existing users. Plenty of people are just used to working with the Flash timeline and for many, this is the only timeline they have ever worked with.  I think there are similar uses of AfterEffects — people who have been using the app since its incarnation and would not appreciate “dumbing it down” to gain more users from the Flash community.

So bringing back LiveMotion (maybe they’ll call it Flash Pro Animator or even AfterEffects Elements) makes a lot of sense to me. Give LiveMotion a 2006 update to bring it up to Flash 8 features, fix the poor ActionScript support (from what I remember AS was painful in LM), provide some new features such as being able to import and export of both FLA and AE projects and sell it for an attractive price point.   Oh yeah..and kill off the Flash Basic product.

Just my two cents.. take it for what its worth.

Thanks to biskero.org for blogging about WP 2.0 being released. I just upgraded and everything went fine (knock on wood). So far, I am like the update. I hope to get some more time under the seat with WP2 later today and tomorrow and see what else is lurking.

One thing for sure is I like the new setup for writing posts. Much nicer than before.